Magister Commercii - MCom / Nearly half a century after independence, the Cameroon economy has experienced little or no growth in per capita incomes in spite of the enormous natural and human potentials of the country and in spite of the huge packages of aid and subsequent debt relief received from the international donor community, suggesting a more profound cause to the development problems facing the country. Under the current WTO rules-based system of multi-lateral trade management, Cameroon, like other poor countries, is left with limited scope for effective implementation of industrial and trade policies that could bail her out of her present predicament. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to explore the fundamental determinants of sustainable growth within the context of the Cameroonian economy. While acknowledging the role of openness to international markets in promoting growth, its effects could only be maximised with the attainment of certain threshold conditions such as the availability of basic skills, provision of vital infrastructure services and public goods, and good governance. In a nutshell, for development to happen, the country needs not only well functioning markets, but also good governments that do not steal the fruits of workers' labour. Drawing on the endogenous growth models, the study suggests that incentives for investment in knowledge capital, for infrastructure provision and for good governance could bail the country out of its low level traps, setting it on the path of sustainable growth in an evermore globalising world economy.

Esta tesis doctoral es una colección de tres artículos. Los capítulos 1 y 2, co-autorados con Joachim Voth, investigan por qué Europa en 1700 ya era más rico que el resto del mundo y por qué Inglaterra fue el primer país en industrializarse. Encontramos que las dinámicas de la población, en lugar del crecimiento de la productividad, fueron los promotores más importantes del desarrollo económico de Europa Occidental durante la temprana edad moderna (1450-1700). Calibramos un modelo probabilístico para representar Inglaterra en 1700 y encontramos que ingresos iniciales más altos unidos a limitaciones de fertilidad aumentaron la probabilidad de industrialización. En el tercer capítulo, presento un nuevo hecho estilizado y analizo su contribución al sesgo del cambio tecnológico hacia los trabajadores más cualificados: El porcentaje de trabajadores cualificados en la producción intermedia está altamente correlacionado con la proporción de trabajo cualificado en la producción final. Esto genera un efecto multiplicador que refuerza la demanda de trabajo cualificado a lo largo de la cadena de producción. El efecto es importante, explica más de un tercio del aumento de la demanda de trabajadores cualificados en la industria manufacturera de EE.UU. / This dissertation is a collection of three essays. Chapters 1 and 2, co-authored with Joachim Voth, investigate the question why Europe in 1700 was ahead of the rest of the world and why England was the first country to industrialize. We find that population dynamics, rather than productivity growth, were the most important drivers for Western Europe to overtake China in the early modern period (1450-1700). We calibrate a probabilistic model to match England in 1700 and find that higher initial per capita incomes together with fertility limitation increased its industrialization probabilities. In the third chapter, I present a novel stylized fact and analyze its contribution to the skill bias of technical change: The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This delivers a multiplier that reinforces skill demand along the production chain. The effect is large, accounting for more than one third of the observed skill upgrading in U.S. manufacturing.